Bonnie and Clyde: The Lives Behind the Legend (John MacRae Books) [Hardcover]

Paul Schneider (Author)

Book Description

Series: John MacRae Books | Publication Date: March 31, 2009

The flesh-and-blood story of the outlaw lovers who robbed banks and shot their way across Depression-era America, based on extensive archival research, declassified FBI documents, and interviews

The daring movie revolutionized Hollywood—now the true story of Bonnie and Clyde is told in the lovers’ own voices, with verisimilitude and drama to match Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood.

Strictly nonfiction—no dialogue or other material has been made up—and set in the dirt-poor Texas landscape that spawned the star-crossed outlaws, Paul Schneider’s brilliantly researched and dramatically crafted tale begins with a daring jailbreak and ends with an ambush and shoot-out that consigns their bullet-riddled bodies to the crumpled front seat of a hopped-up getaway car.

Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow’s relationship was, at the core, a toxic combination of infatuation blended with an instinct for going too far too fast. The poetry-writing petite Bonnie and her gun-crazy lover drove lawmen wild. Despite their best efforts the duo kept up their exploits, slipping the noose every single, damned time. That is until the weight of their infamy in four states caught up with them in the famous ambush that literally blasted away their years of live-action rampage in seconds. Without glamorizing the killers or vilifying the cops, the book, alive with action and high-level entertainment, provides a complete picture of America’s most famous outlaw couple and the culture that created them.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The lives and the legends of doomed outlaw lovers Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker unfortunately take a back seat to Schneider's narrative style in this heavily researched but poorly executed account. Despite his claim that no dialogue has been invented, Schneider's approach—addressing Clyde as you (Feels like you and Bonnie are hot as hell everywhere)—is jarring and irritating. Opening in 1934 when Bonnie and Clyde helped several prisoners break out from Eastham Prison Farm in Texas, , Schneider (Brutal Journey) then rewinds to Clyde's hardscrabble youth in the slums outside Dallas, where he met Bonnie in 1930. The increasingly violent exploits of the Barrow Gang are evocative, especially Clyde's first—and arguably only—premeditated murder in 1931. Yet true to his style, even in their final moments in the ambushed, bullet-ridden car, Schneider forces on readers his own version of Clyde's last thoughts—you remember Bonnie drinking hot chocolate—and ruins what should have been a moment of literal and literary silence. B&w photos. (May)
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From Booklist

Almost 75 years ago, the four-year murder and robbery spree of Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow ended in a hail of bullets on a desolate Louisiana road. During those four years, the Barrow Gang held up a few banks, knocked over numerous grocery stores, killed several police officers, and successfully cast themselves as latter-day Robin Hoods struggling against an unjust social order. This work strives, successfully for the most part, to strip away the sensationalism and view the couple and their exploits accurately. More lyrical than Jeff Guinn in Go Down Together: The True, Untold Story of Bonnie and Clyde (2009), Schneider uses the words and even thoughts of key players to tell their story. He eloquently describes the bleak, Depression-era environment that helped spawn Bonnie and Clyde and made the public willing to accept a pair of damaged souls as romantic figures. For both crime aficionados and general readers with an interest in the era, this book is of great value. --Jay Freeman

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 400 pages
• Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.; First Edition edition (March 31, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0805086722
• ISBN-13: 978-0805086720
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.4 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (15 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #723,305 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Bonnie and Clyde, March 31, 2009

By 

A. Omer - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Bonnie and Clyde: The Lives Behind the Legend (John MacRae Books) (Hardcover)

Bonnie and Clyde: The Lives Behind the Legend
If an amusement park spent millions on a Bonnie and Clyde adventure extravaganza, you would not get a more thrilling ride than might be had by reading, Paul Schneider's latest book, "Bonnie and Clyde, the Lives behind the Legend."
Clyde Barrow came of age during the Great Depression, if it can be said that he came of age at all -- he was killed when he was 25 (Bonnie Parker, at 24.) This May marks the 75th anniversary of their deaths.
Among the street toughs in and around Dallas, Texas, Barrow worked his way up from petty theft to cars and eventually banks. His reputation grew, and as he managed to stay ahead of the law, his real life exploits came close to matching, and in some cases exceeding, that reputation.
Mr. Schneider ("The Adirondacks," "The Enduring Shore," and "Brutal Journey") conjures a very palatable desperation as well as the excitement of life on the run -- a life with a limited future. His deft delivery will have the reader sweating along with Clyde and his gang, feeling the hunger, desolation, exhaustion, and the camaraderie among thieves.
The story is like a Greek tragedy. There are no surprise endings in traditional Greek tragedy, and no surprise endings in "Bonnie and Clyde." (Most of us have seen the 1967 movie starring Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway.) But it is not the end, but the journey that makes this book worth reading.
Yes, the story includes the car chases, gun battles, and the extraordinary coincidences and bad luck that fed the legend. But there are also the personal battles and questions, Bonnie's poetry and unfailing sense of style and devotion, the thoughts of family, friends and adversaries, and the historic backdrop of Texas during the Depression.
Almost immediately, Mr. Schneider sets the stage and mood with his mastery of descriptive prose. He moves between a narrative that at times seems to mimic those 1930 movie narrators -- part third person omniscient vernacular, and an unusual second person omniscient voice that somehow puts you in the center of all the activity.
Perhaps the most unusual and impressive aspect of this book is that every quoted personal conversation is comprised of words that were actually spoken or written about or by the people doing the talking. These quotes are referenced in 343 citations at the end of the book. Mr. Schneider's ability to rehash and synthesize massive quantities of data into an absorbing read is nothing short of masterful.
Paul Schneider has written another winner. It may be his best book yet.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Fascinating Read, May 3, 2010

By 

Janna Haymes Massey (Leslie, AR, US) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Bonnie and Clyde: The Lives Behind the Legend (John MacRae Books) (Hardcover)

Historically well researched book.Written from Clyde's point of view, at first I found it a bit irritating,but soon got into the flow of it and could hardly put it down.Anyone who cares about historical accuaracy will love this book.

8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Fascinating subject matter rendered dull and life-less, June 7, 2009

By 

S. Hammel (Los Angeles, CA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Bonnie and Clyde: The Lives Behind the Legend (John MacRae Books) (Hardcover)

With BONNIE AND CLYDE: THE LIVES BEHIND THE LEGENDS Schneider accomplishes the nearly impossible -- he has created a book on the exploits of the Depression-era couple that is dull and uninteresting.

Like many who will approach this book, I have read other accounts of the lives of Bonnie and Clyde and other '30's eras gangsters. Bonnie and Clyde's time on the lam with the law in pursuit is filled with exciting and fascinating incidents. But Schneider often gets bogged down in his own research veering off into tangents on the historical period or the most minor of characters, which time and again slows down his narrative.

Rather than being compelling, Schneider's account proves to be less than accessible and surprisingly slow.

The biggest problem is the book's literary conceits. Schneider strives to set his deeply researched biography apart from other accounts by giving it the spin of a non-fiction novel, which never allows him to insert the voice of the researcher, comparing and contrasting versions of events or explaining things cleanly.

The most flawed concept is the insistence on referring to Clyde Barrow as 'you' throughout. Perhaps Schneider initially felt this devise would place the reader in Barrow's head. Instead it proves to do the opposite. It distances the reader from Barrow and from being engaged in the book. Since the perspective of the book jumps around from him using various research and old first-person sources, whenever we come back to Barrow as "you" it is jarring and clumsy. Many times Schneider has to bend sentence structures in pretzel knots to accomodate this devise, when, God forbid, "Clyde" or "Barrow" would have served so much more clearly and cleanly.

I still feel like the best primary source on the lives of Bonnie and Clyde is THE TRUE STORY OF BONNIE AND CLYDE by Emma Parker (Bonnie's mother) and Nell Barrow (Clyde's sister) "Edited" by Jan I. Fortune. Originally published as FUGITVES shortly after Bonnie and Clyde's death. While the prejdices of the sources must be considered, Fortune did an excellent job retaining the voices of Barrow and Parker in the telling of the story, so that these many years later the story takes on a certain literary quality with the flavor of a folk tale being told to you.

THE LIVES AND TIMES OF BONNIE AND CLYDE by E.R. Milner is a much more compelling and readable recent history of their lives. And MY LIFE WITH BONNIE AND CLYDE an edited autobiography by gang member Blanche Barrow also vividly pulls you inside the Bonnie and Clyde story in a way that Schneider's book fails to.

Schneider' book contains many details and incidents I don't recall reading before and may therefore be of interest to others with an insatiable fascination with Bonnie and Clyde, but Schneider tried so hard to make this book interesting, he succeeded only in doing quite the opposite.